Tibetan activist at a Free Tibet protest rally in Taipei, Taiwan.

Renowned combat photographer Robert Capa once said “if your photos aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough”. Making your subject bigger by getting closer is a surefire way to improve your photos. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a person, a waterfall or a hungry lion, the more the subject appears to fill the frame, the greater the drama the viewer senses.

Filling the frame is all about eliminating anything not essential to the subject being photographed. When it’s a person, such as in the photo above, we need to be close if we want the viewer to read the message on his cheeks and see the facial details. We don’t need to see the people or buildings behind him; in fact, if we were farther away the subject would tend to get “lost” in a sea of people. We want to remove all those distractions and focus all the viewer’s attention on our subject.

One difficulty photographers often run into is that they think they’re filling the frame when they’re not. Sometimes there’s so much going on at a scene that it’s easy to think we are closer than we really are. So try and take a few steps forward, or use a telephoto lens. Before you press the shutter button, glance around the edges of the viewfinder (and remember that most camera viewfinders don’t cover 100% of the view) to see if there any distractions that could be eliminated. If, after doing all this, you get home and find the subject is too small, don’t be afraid to use the crop tool, although this may limit the size you can display the photo at.

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